Ever wanted to know how some computer games randomly create scenarios, landscapes and the like? Check out the Procedural Generation Wiki, a fledgling home for the mindbending programming concepts that make it possible.

It's all about creating the rules but letting a computer do all the work, then watching like a baffled god as unexpected wonders evolve before one's eyes. There's everthing from visual art generated on-the-go, to entire worlds modeled with landscapes, climates and histories. It let 1984's Elite contain an universe to explore in only 32kb of RAM; next year's Spore will bottle similar magic for a new generation of gamers.

Created by Roguelike developer Andrew Doull, the wiki already has 350 articles in its first week. Doull laments the lack of cellular automata-based content. Hear Hear! Sick of fractals, I once made a CA-based terrain generator.

What they want... [ASCII Dreams]

When we were a young site, our mother — a stout search engine from Reno named Veronica — she'd sit us on her lap, wipe our tears, and promise us that the mean little boys in the server playground wouldn't be our tormentors forever. We'd blossom, she said and smoothed our hair, and meet a tall web site who would sweep us off our feet.

We don't get ahead of ourselves, but we met the cutest site last night. We talked about videogames for hours.

About Jetpack Brontosaurus, the latest game from the creators of Off-Road Velociraptor Safari, in which you pretend you're a giant dino flying through the crowds.

We were chatting philosphy next to the fire when he leaned over and whisper warmly, "Did you know they're making a sequel to Beyond Good & Evil?" We'll admit: we were having a few evil thoughts ourselves.

And he's so knowledgeable but so modest! When he told us that Nvidia was holding 62% of the graphics card market over ATi, he admitted having read the statistics in the Valve hardware survey.

He's not afraid to speak out against injustice, either, like the shocking number of Windows games that don't support Alt-Tab.

Got a good job, too. Said he impressed them when he put his World of Warcraft experience on his resume.

We may have something. Maybe it's too soon to say. But we're supposed to meet again next Friday.

Keep your inner foul-mouthed Mexican teenager sequestered here. You'll have to take a few deep breaths to maneuver your way past the sensationalist tone and outright dishonest claims about the nature of Wii Fit to find the few decent criticisms at the core of this Daily Mail article. You're probably going to want to throw a stick of butter and shout "WHY SO SAD, FATTIES?" at the obesity experts in the UK criticizing Wii Fit for daring to call their overweight children overweight. But it seems to me that there's something to their complaining.

Summary: leading obesity experts in the UK are upset that Wii Fit uses BMI to pigeonhole children as being underweight, ideal or overweight. They are calling for the sale of Wii Fit to be banned for children. Wii Fit heavily uses the BMI measurement system, which isn't terrible as a very vague rule of thumb but, as an actual scientific system of determining health or attractiveness, is utterly worthless. More over, one of the Daily Mail's examples is that a 10 year old girl who weighed 84 pounds at 4 foot 9 was classified as "overweight." If true, that's either a serious bug or a loathsomely narrow definition on Nintendo's part of what constitutes fitness. However, that seems to be the sole data point in the evidence of the critique... hardly the sort of thing people who aren't already desperate to be offended would get up in arms about. It could simply be a broken Wii Fit board.

Like I said, the tone of the piece is both indignant and dishonest: they claim that children are being told they are "fat" in Wii Fit, even though the actual terminology is the far more neutral "overweight." Perhaps that's a semantic niggle, but it's the difference between telling a kid they need to do a bit more exercise and calling them an Orca and warning people not to get within splash zone for fear of mucus membrane infection. On the other hand, should a program marketed to kids be calling them overweight? Only doctors and parents should be telling that to a kid. A far better approach would simply be to encourage kids to become more active, not merely to get their BMI within a target zone. Wii Fit could have kept its own damn criticisms to itself and still helped a kid get in better shape.

I don't have Wii Fit, gleaning all my information about how it works from reviews online, so perhaps this is all being wildly blown out of proportion. If you own Wii Fit, what do you think? Is this much ado about nothing, or was there a better way for Nintendo to handle this? Perhaps a more sensitive and less judgmental Wii Fit children's mode?

Obesity experts condemn Nintendo's Wii 'Fit' game after it tells 10-year-old girl she's fat [Daily Mail]

After hugely successful launches in Japan and Europe, Nintendo's Wii Fit exercise game is coming to the United States May on 19th, where it is sure to find sales success. But Wii Fit is hardly the first example of an attempt to meld videogaming and exercise — it's not even the first fitness offering from Nintendo.

Atari Joyboard (1982)
In 1982, Atari released the "Joyboard," a simple four-switch balance board controller for the Atari 2600 that stuffed the guts of a standard joystick into a ridged, black plastic slab. A single game was released for the Joyboard. Dubbed Mogul Maniac, the game emulated the experience of slalom skiing with all the subtlety a four-position digital sensor could provide.

The Joyboard is generally considered a failure, too finicky for nuanced control. In fact, one of the most interesting uses for the Joyboard involved not triggering its switches: some claim, perhaps apocryphally, that engineers building the Commodore Amiga used to manage development stress by sitting perfectly motionless on the Joyboard in zazen, leading to the "Guru Meditation" verbiage in the Amiga's crash warning dialog. Game developer Ian Bogost developed a game of the same name that uses the Joyboard as an interface, in which fully motionless sitting causes an on-screen guru avatar to slowly decamp from his mat into the air with yogic flight. [Image: AtariAge.com]

Had the Joyboard seen retail triumph, it's conceivable Atari might have developed a proper exercise game, complete with weight statistics and performance tracking.

Carnegie Mellon University's new online games are designed to make other programs smarter by learning from the players. Each multi-player title encapsulates a class of problem that remain impossible for computers to solve.

"We have games that can help improve Internet image and audio searches,
enhance artificial intelligence and teach computers to see," Luis von Ahn, of CMU's Computer Science deaprtment, said in a press release. "But that shouldn't matter to the players because it turns out these games are super fun."

So far, there are four "Games with a Purpose." Matchin, which has players judge which of two images is more appealing, aims to improve image search algorithms. Tag a Tune has players describe songs, so that listeners may search for songs with certain emotional qualities; Verbosity, a "common sense" test game designed to help AI programs become smarter; and Squigi, which has players outline objects in photos to teach computers how to do likewise.

Play the games [GWAP]

The Xbox 360 will not transmogrify into a slick but faintly unrealistic 3D-rendered fantasy in 2009, according to manufacturer Microsoft. From Engadget:

"Microsoft representative let us know today that "While we don't normally comment on rumors like this, we can tell you that we have no plans to release a new console in 2009". Yep, rumor assassinated, just like that."

Microsoft says no new Xbox 360s in 2009 [Engadget, pic from xbox360fanboy]

In response to rumors of an Apple portable gaming machine, Joel pointed out that it's a completely stupid rumor. This is because the iPhone already exists, and the only thing standing between it and gaming wonder is a pernicious assumption that you can't do anything interesting without a D-Pad and physical buttons.

Cult of Mac has a piece today making the same point, but it offers hard facts about the system that bring out in sharp relief how much potential it has. See the chart:

With its beefy specs and rapid sales, the iPhone's potential as a gaming machine is so overwhelming it would be odd if Apple didn't push it hard sooner or later.
You may already own the best portable gaming device [CoM]

The outward limits on fandom tightly border total insanity. A squadron of Russian gamers, clad in gas masks, army fatigues and melted mutant rubber masks, bribed Russian officials to take them deep into the mutagenic wasteland of Chernbobyl's Zone of Alienation and cosplay a real-life version of the sci-fi PC game S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl. About the only thing they didn't do to attain 100% verisimilitude is hire out some of the children from Chernobyl's depressingly real mutant orphanages to shoot with their paint guns.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Cosplay [Webpark.ru via Rock Paper Shotgun]

Gamejump, a company that offers ad-supported games for many mobile phones, has added several titles from Sega to their line-up. If you can stomach the ads — and you have a data plan so you won't be charged every time a new ad loads — it might be worth the hassle.

Games Page [Games.Gamejump.com via Crave.CNET.com]

Gavin Anderson snapped this picture of the "Sub Marine Catcher," a traditional claw game that replaces the moldy stuffed animals with adorable clacking lobsters. Snuggle up with a crustacean tonight!

There should be a bonus token that you can capture that, upon removal from the tank, causes the entire contraption to heat to boiling and spits out bibs and cups of melted butter.

Marine Catcher or the claws of Death! [Flickr via Serious Eats via Eat Geek]

Sightseeing in Liberty City is a fantastic Flickr gallery dedicated to contrasting locations from Grand Theft Auto 4 with their real-world NYC counterparts. The bottom image, for example, is a comparison between Brooklyn's Paramount Theater and Liberty City's Canyon Theater. I must buy this game already... damn German censorship laws.

Sightseeing in Liberty City [Flickr]

"Think about the amount of graphical horsepower in your bottom-end machine these days — it's totally suitable for delivering a rich game experience," explains Mark Frohnmayer, co-founder of indie developer Garage Games. That's what they're counting on with "Instant Action," a web-based multiplayer gaming portal that offers casual gamers more than just simple puzzle games. Even lowly office computers, built to browse the web and munge a few spreadsheets, now have enough power to play 3D games — first-person shooters, racers, even flight simulators — that would have been state-of-the-art just a few years ago.

"I think Nintendo demonstrated very well that cutting-edge hardware wasn't required for delivering really awesome game experiences," Frohnmayer continues. And because Garage Games was founded to provide the inexpensive tools and support for indie developers — including the "Torque" game engine, built on work started when many of the Garage Games founders created Tribes 2 at the legendary but scuttled game company Dynamix — the company has a lot of experience squeezing good graphics out of "baseline" PC hardware.

But it's not the graphics which are most compelling about Instant Action; they are good enough to serve the gameplay, and that is that. Instead, Garage Games has built an entire social gaming platform, complete with friends lists, leaderboards (soon), simple team functions, and all the other accoutrements of a modern games delivery platform right inside the browser. If digital download services like Valve's Steam are the iTunes of the PC gaming world, then Instant Action could be the first YouTube. Players can ever cut-and-paste a simple hyperlink to be sent to their friends. Anyone who clicks the link won't just be taken to InstantAction.com; they'll be added automatically to the ongoing multiplayer match in which their friend is playing.

Unlike YouTube, however, Instant Action isn't a place to discover loads of user-generated or indie content...yet. Of the current games, all are funded in part by Garage Games. Specifics on each development deal varies, but General Manager Andy Yang explained that Garage Games is letting these hired guns retain the IP to their games, which is laudable. While the games currently available show polish — I've enjoyed quite a few sessions of the simple FPS sports shooter, Rokkitball — Yang acknowledged that the current Beta phase of Instant Action is in some ways measuring time, adding new features and stability, while waiting for the platform's first smash hit.

Like Fallen Empire: Legions, perhaps, the next game to be launched on Instant Action, currently in closed beta. A sort of "Tribes Lite," the first-person team combat game keeps the jetpacks and skiing (now "skating") from Dynamix's classic Tribes and Tribes 2, but leaves most of the tactical gameplay features behind in favor of quick matches. As a Tribes snob, I'll never be happy until someone creates a full-blown, triple-A update to my most beloved game of all time. Bearing that unhealthy bias in mind, I've found Legions to be an engaging way to wile away a few minutes here and there. It's certainly the most involved web-based game I've ever downloaded in a couple of minutes and played.

But when I'm at my Windows gaming rig, I could also be playing other PC games. It's when I'm on the road with my Mac — no Parallels or VMWare to be found — that I often wish I could kill a few minutes cursing at the inequities of hotel Wi-Fi as a cover for my poor aiming skills. Good news, then, that Instant Action should also be available on OS X in "four to six weeks," give or take. The Torque engine, which currently powers all the Instant Action games (although other engines can and will be supported), already runs on OS X. And most of the games available for the Windows version of Instant Action are almost ported to OS X. (Even though Instant Action is web-based, the engines still run as executables in the background; you can't make these sorts of 3D games with Javascript or Flash yet.)

Instant Action is currently in invite-queued beta, although more slots will be opening soon. Legions will be moving out of lockdown in the next few weeks. Like all Instant Action games so far, the basic games are free to play, with optional skins, widgets, avatars, and guaranteed server slots costing extra. (So far no gameplay affecting items are available for purchase in games and it sounds like Garage Games intends to keep it that way.)

Apple is getting ready to launch a portable gaming device this year. Many of you already own it. It's called the iPhone.

The Register is running a rumor piece that posits that the iPhone 3G will be announced before WWDC, opening up space in the keynote for Jobs to introduce an entirely new device. This theory is based mostly on reports that inventory of current model iPhones is low. Surely this means that Apple will be announcing the iPhone 3G soon? Think of all the lost sales!

Apple has thought of the lost sales, I'm sure — sales they'll quickly make up next month if they have ample iPhone 3G stock on the shelves waiting to be slurped by shoppers. No one is going to not buy an iPhone today who wouldn't also buy a better model in a month from now (or at least not enough people to matter). Remember, WWDC is less than a month away.

The next part of the rumor follows: What would Apple announce at WWDC that would supplant the announcement of the iPhone 3G? Why a handheld gaming device, of course, since it's an entertainment market in which Apple has only dabbled. Plus, they registered some gaming trademarks in February, so surely...

Gaming is a big part of Apple's future. I said as much right after the SDK launch, as did both game and Mac developers. But there's no way Apple — just getting ready to complete its first year with its most important new product line — is going to cleave the platform in two just for to add a couple of extra buttons and a directional-pad. Anyone who thinks so has missed the sea change happening in gaming over the last few years, as casual games with simplified interfaces have become the dominant form of videogame play for many consumers.

Apple isn't going to try to fight Nintendo. They don't have to, just like Nintendo no longer has to fight Sony or Microsoft in the home console market. Instead, Apple has several million iPhone and iPod Touch customers already, each of whom will be able to download games over the air to their devices. Apple doesn't need to compete with Sony or Nintendo to grab market from them. Apple just needs to sell games to their customers. And I'm sure they're going to sell a ton, if only because it seems like every indie Mac developer out there is working on a game for the iPhone. The first Peggle on the iPhone is going to net its developer a lot of money.*

We're going to hear a lot more about Apple and gaming over the next couple of years, but it'll be the sort of backdoor success that happens when quality games are released on a device with a clever way to purchase them, not some bastard offshoot that's part iPhone, part PSP. Unless your conception of a gaming platform is something other than "a standardized handheld machine which can play games," the iPhone is a more-than-capable gaming device all by itself.

* Or, you know, actual Peggle from PopCap, which is coming.

After looking up the definition of "insouciant" — it's a quality expressed by sauce pans, I think — browsing the headlines of our favorite PC gaming blog Rock, Paper, Shotgun is my favorite mid-day work avoidance routine. Here are some of the week's best:

• Pirates director Gore Verbinski to direct a BioShock film. Says RPS, "The immediate problem with using the existing narrative is that, unlike the game, the audience isn’t in the shoes of the lead character, so Bioshock’s moments of greatest resonance will be that much tougher to achieve. Potentially the big reveal could be a bit Sixth Sense - which, in fairness, was reasonably affecting on the first viewing." As long as the Big Daddies have a love interest in the Little Sisters, re-cast as large-breasted algae farmers but still wearing the same filmy dresses, everything should be fine. Oh, and someone should ride a whale just ahead of a slow-motion explosion.

• Wolf 3D turns 16. I'm just linking this because of the Lego Hitler mecha.

• Is the future of consoles the PC? asks Rossignol, who posits future gaming will be done on a monolithic home computing slab which broadcasts the visuals over IP to the display and interface of your choice. My take: I think it will be just like that, but different.

• Spore and Mass Effect (PC) will have onerous, unnecessary DRM. I actually sold my 360 copy of Mass Effect in anticipation of the PC version. Ah well. More DRM-less Sins of a Solar Empire for me.

• Ken Levine and 2K Boston to remake X-Com? As one of the only games from that era that stands the test of time (some of the interface is a little rough, but more than ably smoothed over by the waves of general brilliance) X-Com deserves an all-star polishing up. But only if — and I acknowledge that I'm about to become the fussy, aging, ossifying gamer I loathe — it's turn-based.

Portable console designer Ben Heck's latest project is a Guitar Hero hack that adds a useable floor pedal to the guitar controller. The pedal's most universal application is to allow you to use the whammy bar like a wa-wa pedal, but it also lets one-armed amputees play Guitar Hero by strumming with their foot. That's probably the way I'd use it too: as it is, it's hard to strum and keep your hand triumphantly aloft in a digital devil horns gesture.

Guitar Hero Pedal Controllers [Ben Heck]

A company called "Immersion" holds a patent that allows them to claim royalties for things that vibrate or provide force-feedback. They're the reason that Sony's Playstation 3 controllers had no rumble features at first — it took losing an $82 million lawsuit before Sony capitulated.

But you know what else vibrates? Things you put inside yourself for sexual pleasure. (Including my personal all-natural pleasure generator: a jar of bees. Just be sure to keep the lid on tight or it won't just be a colony that's collapsing.)

Immersion didn't want to enforce its patents on teledildonic gaming devices — the name is also the cleaning instructions! — so they licensed the rights to the blandly named "Internet Services, LLC", who is in turn suing some other people and then the lawyer left so they sued him and oh I appear to be falling asleep.

Point is, the very same company who makes money for people putting pager motors in videogame controllers also will get money every time you use a USB pocket pleasurer or a commercial interactive deep core drilling simulation. Or would in theory, provided anyone actually used teledildonics for anything more than fodder for tittering.

Keker & Van Nest wants to get away from client with cybersex patent rights; won't say why [The Priot Art via Techdirt]

Previously • SeXBox: Using force feedback signals for sex toys [BB]

Craftster publishes a how-to, penned by someone by the name of "Fluffypants."

Duck Hunt zapper lamp [Craftster via ShinyShiny]

Dan Isett, the Parents Television Council’s Director of Public Policy, was caught lying about the content of top-selling game GTA IV, and his experience of it, by an enterprising reporter who went to the trouble of actually playing it himself.

Have you played the game?

“I’ve actually played ‘Grand Theft Auto IV,’ and it’s right in keeping with previous versions. The series continues to lower the bar and this is the first game that has an alcohol content warning. You get points for driving drunk in this game.”

You know that’s not true, right? The game doesn’t have points.

“If nothing else, it’s a rewarded activity. Necessary for advancement.”

I don’t think so.

“But there’s an alcohol content warning and a scene of drunk driving, correct?”

They don't really care about the game; to its critics, it's just a button to push. But when everyone is generally savvier about the game's content than them, especially the media, how can they expect to be taken seriously?

"You get points for driving drunk in this game" [AZ Night Buzz]

Update: Reuters has a short feature on "Grand Theft Childhood: The Surprising Truth About Violent Video Games and What Parents Can Do ," a new book from a husband-and-wife research team at Harvard Med that argues that the link between aggressive behavior in kids and violent videogames might be the inverse of the common argument.

The researchers found that 51 percent of boys who played M-rated games -- the industry's equivalent of an R-rated movie, meaning suitable for ages 17 and up -- had been in a fight in the past year, compared to 28 percent of non-M-rated gamers.

You have to love the hysteria implicit in the Reuters headline, too, as if the idea that videogames created killers was the consensus view until this new book was published. – Joel

Video games don't create killers, new book says [Reuters]

This is what the Nintendo Entertainment System would look like if it were made now, but if now was still in the 1980s. Designed by Javier Segovia of Spain, it's very much a refinement of the original, a curious speculative interpolation of two gaming zeitgeists, decades apart. But something holds it back from being truly wonderful, at least for me.

Perhaps it's the awareness that its a pretty but otherwise unoriginal rehash, all shiny 21st century case-molding and modeling techniques. A real redesigned NES could be smaller than the NES's cartridges, while a machine this large could play more than just NES games (and in fact already exists, being called the Wii.)

I think my ideal retro remake consoles would look something like an elongated pyramid, the size of a bar of Toblerone, just large enough to accommodate the cartridge slot. One could line them up in a neat (perhaps modular!) row atop thin TV sets, with identically-shaped but differently-designed models for each console.

Portfolio Page [reNESED via Kotaku]

United in plosive time lapse synchronicity, three bottle-blowers play a song known to Russians as Korobeiniki but to most Americans as Gameboy Tetris Music Type A, and it's just about the best version of the song since Ozma took a stab at it. At first, I suspected trickery: surely no three individuals could remain in such musical synchronicity after having emptied what appears to be a couple dozen bottles of beer, wine and vodka between them. Then it all made sense: their song choice betrays them as Russians, after all.

Tetris Theme on Bottles [Snotr via Gizmodo]

If the reproductive therapy worked a little better than expected, keep the litter entertained with Amstel's gargantuan foosball table, created for a Champions' League promo event. Big enough for 22 players—a full soccer team—it has 24 legs, dozens of little plastic men, and requires 6 flight cases to be shipped.

Source [Home Airworks via DVICE]

Sony's UX UMPC is certainly powerful enough to run Unreal Tournament 2004, but with a four-inch arrangement of QWERTY chiclets for a control scheme, it's certainly not going to be playable. Modder Dan Middle decided he wanted to transform his UX into the ultimate portable fragging device, so he hacked a USB gamepad to fit the UX. The mod is simple — it's basically a foldable mini USB gamepad that slots into the UX's compact flash port with a dummy CF card for stability while plugging into the USB port just beneath. I doubt you'd want to jump online with this configuration, but it's good enough to instagib on the road.

DIY gamepad attachment for Sony UX UMPC [Slashgear]

In a refreshingly non-evil move from a company that seems to make a point of not being quite as evil as I think they secretly must be, Microsoft has announced that they are teaming up with the Companions in Courage Foundation to install special Xbox 360 kiosks in children's hospitals around the country.

The kiosks will be packed with games, movies and television shows — most likely of the more innocuous Viva Pinata sort instead of eyebrow-raising murder-death-kill simulations. Even better, the 360s will come installed with a special version of Xbox Live that will only match up sick kids in multiplayer matches from children's hospitals around the country. The sound of sobbing is about to be replaced with peals of laughter, automatic weapons fire and triumphant shouts of "OWNED, NOOB!"

Nothing to criticize here: this is just pure class. Good on you, Microsoft. If you want to donate to help bring more 360 Kiosks to hospitals around the country, consider giving a donation to Companions in Courage.

360 Kiosks Coming to Children's Hospitals [Kotaku]

You came, you saw, you conquered. You backstabbed engineers, uber-ed pyros, farmed medic achievements and beat mesomorphic Austrians clean to death with baseball bats... all while the Boing Boing puppet masters clapped their hands in fey delight at the gladiatorial orgy they had Nero-like decreed.

And now we're ready to declare our awesomest player for last weekend's Boing Boing Team Fortress 2, with the adjective "awesomest" decided entirely by Happy Mutant whim. This player will receive a Neuros OSD video storage device. And by consensus, our winner is... Bunnystew. At over 10 hours logged into our server, Bunnystew was this weekend's most committed Boing Boing Team Fortress 2 player, by far. Congrats, Bunnystew! Drop brownlee at boing boing dot net an email to receive your prize.

For the rest of you guys, don't fear: we've got the server for a little while, and we'll schedule matches every weekend until we give it up. Thanks for playing, guys! See you this weekend.

RockPaperShotgun, as our most respected gaming blog by far, deserves more than the occasional misappropriation of its work, sandwiched between a link and a quip. Accordingly, we're formalizing the creative incest and will regularly swap headlines on a wholesale basis.

Seriously, these guys rule. Even if you're not interested in games (who are you kidding?), they're smart, insouciant and dedicated to the craft. Read on for the links.